Register of members

We maintain an online database called MemberDB. We also keep paper copies of all membership forms in the top drawer of the filing cabinet for each year. It is a requirement of being an incorporation that we keep these details, so it is important to make sure all members fill in a new form, even if they are rejoining.

If someone who is not a club administrator wants to view the register, they are only entitled to see the name and postal address of other members, in which case it is best not to create a user for somebody who wants to view the register. If a member wants to view another members postal address they may ask an administrator (wheel or committee member), or if they want the entire list they must ask wheel to extract the relevant information. Other information about a person cannot be given away without the permission of that person, which requires them to either accept the club privacy policy (which doesn't exist) or for the person in question to give specific permission on a per-case basis.

Correspondence of the Club

The club has a number of communication platforms that are used by its members.

Email and mailing lists

IRC / Discord

Facebook page and group

Most correspondence is by email. You can access ucc email at http://webmail.ucc.asn.au, or you can SSH to motsugo and run alpine, or you can forward your mail to another email address.

We have mailing lists. Most lists have archives, so you don't have to save copies. Mail sent to secretary@ should go to you, and won't be archived; forward it to committee@ or ucc@ if it is important.

You (and everyone else on committee-only@) should receive emails from mailman when a non-subscriber posts to a mailing list. Visit the URL and you can approve the message. Ask wheel or another committee member if you don't have the moderation password.

In addition to the list committee@, which anyone can subscribe to, there is a committee-only@. This is not actually a mailing list, and only the current year's committee members will get emails sent to the address. They will not be archived. Using this address is discouraged, but sometimes useful for sensitive conversations. Mostly we use it to give committee a chance to proof read important emails before they are sent.

We also have a post box with the guild. The address is:

University Computer Club
Box 22, M300
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway
CRAWLEY WA 6009
Australia

This page should have that and other contact information if you need to supply it.

The mail should be checked at least once a week. To check it, go to guild reception, and tell the receptionist that you are the Secretary of UCC and need to check the mail in Box 22. The boxes are at the top of the stairs to the left of guild reception.

Carrying out instructions and decisions of the Committee

This means to do things like organise clean-ups, notify people of meetings and events, contact people outside the club relating to non-financial matters, organising the AGM and SGMs, etc as decided upon by the committee.

Normally anything important that needs to be done will be discussed at a Committee meeting, and it is important that Committee knows what you are doing.

You should also volunteer to do other tasks if you can, even if they are not administration related.

Maintaining the Constitution

It is also the job of the Secretary to ensure that any changes to the constitution are sent to the appropriate authorities (ie. the Guild, the Commissioner for Consumer Protection, the ACNC and any other organisations that the club may be affiliated to), and that the constitution on the website is correct and up-to-date.

Custody of Documents

This means that you get to take care of the contents everything in the filing cabinet, except for the stuff in the Treasurer's drawer. There are a lot of old books and documents which are an important part of UCC's history, and being the Secretary means that you can effectively veto the throwing out of these things.

Minutes

Minutes must be formatted using Markdown (which is used often on Github and is fairly simple to learn).

You will probably find it easiest to take minutes on a Linux machine using a simple text editor (gedit or kate), since the scripts require a functioning Linux environment. Failing this, one could simply take minutes on a Windows machine in plaintext/markdown format and then copy them to a Linux machine (such as Motsugo) to then run the scripts.

If you don't like the scripts or can't be bothered learning Markdown, you can perform the tasks manually over SSH (such as with PuTTY), but this will take a lot longer.

Using the scripts

agenda-pull

The agenda will be downloaded as a plain text file to YYYY-MM-DD.md, where the filename is based on the current date.

minutes-push

After the meeting, use minutes-push to upload the minutes to the website and send out an email.

Once you are satisfied that the minutes are mostly correct, run:

cd minutesYYYY
./minutes-push YYYY-MM-DD.md

This will not fully publish the minutes! It simply lets you check that the formatting worked properly and gives you a chance to correct it later.

The script tries to call firefox with the URL of the minutes that have been uploaded, and sends a test email to username@ucc.asn.au (which should be your UCC email address). If no web browser is opened, you can simply open the URL printed at the end of the output of the script.

Check that the draft minutes at the URL and in the test email are correct and no formatting errors have occurred.

If something is wrong, update it in the local minutes file and run minutes-push again.

Once you are satisfied that everything is correct, run:

./minutes-push -F YYYY-MM-DD.md

This uploads the minutes to the website at https://ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD.ucc and emails them to ucc@ucc.asn.au.

Check carefully through the test email or the webpage to ensure that you have not made any formatting errors.

Common issues include nested bullet points not being sufficiently indented, lists appearing all on one line, random lines of text appearing bold and in large font and so on. Read the markdown guide to fix this or just add more newlines as appropriate.

You can run the minutes-push as many times as necessary (sending a new test email ONLY to yourself) in order to fix all formatting issues.

Once you are done and are satisfied with the quality of your minutes, run minutes-push with the -F option to commit the minutes and send out the proper email to the mailing lists. This will also update the index page for the minutes archive so that it will appear on the website.

If something breaks, look in the scripts section to find more information. If that doesn't help you can see a wheel member (preferably [FVP]) or try and fix it yourself.

Taking Minutes

Committee members have the option of writing their own reports using vigenda. Encourage them to do this, since it will save you time and speeds up the meeting.

Open the minutes template produced by agenda-pull in a text editor.

During the Meeting

Update the attendance section based on who turns up at the meeting, moving the entries to the appropriate headings (Present, Late, Apologies, etc)

Seperate the committee members present from ordinary members present.

Update the lines Meeting opened/closed at HH:MM to reflect the time the meeting is opened and finally closed by the Chair.

The layout for all the sections of the meeting should already be in the agenda.

Record what people say during the meeting, and try to keep a concise record of discussions that occur.

Editing Things

Taking minutes can be done on any computer. However occasionally you might need to edit a file on one of the servers, for example the webpage, or the timetable data.

You can use nano or vim to do this.

nano might be easier, just move around with the arrow keys and type. There is a list of shortcuts at the bottom that look like ^X - the ^ means to press ctrl plus the key.

If you use the vigenda script, you will need to know how the basics of vim though

The arrow keys move the cursor

vim has things called "modes" for different tasks. Initially vim isn't in any mode.

Press i to start inserting characters

Press esc to go back to no mode.

Press a to append to the end of a line

Press :w to save the file

Add a file name if you want to save it to a different file name

Press :q to quit the file

Add a ! if you have made a change but don't want to save it

Where are the files

All of the useful committee-related directories are available on motsugo or mussel (and a few other servers). Use SSH to login to a server, or you can browse the filesystem remotely using sftp and any decent file manager on Linux/OS X or a program such as WinSCP on Windows.

TLA

Any member who participates in a Committee or General Meeting should have a Three Letter Acronym (TLA).

If they don't have a TLA, try and get them to choose one before the meeting. If that isn't practical (say at a General Meeting where there are 20 people without a TLA), refer to them using their full name, get them to pick a TLA later, and then replace the name with the TLA.

The script runs locally and pipes the plaintext minutes to minutes-receive on Motsugo which does the formatting and sends the emails.

Once minutes are uploaded and the official email is sent, the script calls mkagenda with the path to the latest minutes which generates the next agenda, filling in sections such as Events and Previous Action Items automagically.

agenda-pull grabs the agenda and makes it into a template for the meeting minutes.

vigenda allows committee members to directly edit the agenda.

agenda allows non-committee members to view the agenda and add items to the end of it (which will appear in General Business).

meeting-reminder sends a reminder of the next meeting. This should be run automatically as a cronjob by the secretary.

Supply a day of the week and 24-hour time like so ./meeting-reminder Tuesday 10:00.

Windows Versions

[GOZ] kindly worked out how to make agenda-pull and minutes-push work under Windows. A zip file should be found at /home/other/committee/bin/win-minutes.zip.

If you ever change the original scripts, rebuild the zip file using /home/other/committee/bin/win-minutes/make.sh.

Other Scripts

tla - Enter a username, TLA, or full name to find out the others

account-whinge.sh (and variants) - Alter this and run it to complain at people who haven't paid up membership fees

locking.sh (and variants) - Alter this and run it to lock accounts when people still won't pay the membership fee